Another remembrance

Happy April Fool's Day...Rabbit rabbit! May your month of April be full of good luck, good health, and  laughter!

When my sister, Mary Elizabeth Rogers Miller died in 2018, I posted this blog. It has some great photos of her throughout her life, but they grew less frequent as we didn't have much contact in the last few years. She was very sick, hospitalized I don't know how many times, and still smoking. I wasn't able to visit her because I'd just been diagnosed with my lung conditions.  It took a lot of tough love to say no many times and we had less and less to say to each other.

Mary Elizabeth Rogers (Miller) with my sons, Marty Heym and Russ Heym, probably when Russ was around one year old, taken in the fall of 1968, not developed until April 1969.

My son, Marty on left, Mary in middle, Russ on right. At her home in Houston Texas. in the 1990s probably. On the occasion of a wedding of a Heym cousin.

Because of our distancing from each other (as well as her daughter Lisa) over the years, Mary's last instructions to her lawyer had been to notify Lisa, after her estate had been settled, and that was in March of 2018, though she died Nov. 2017. Lisa sent me an email. She was living somewhere in Europe, and refused any communication with me. She probably believed the lies my sister had been telling about me. I am so sad not to have known Lisa as she grew up and raised her own children. My sister unfortunately was a chronic lier. She wove her own sense of reality around her, and used it as a source of power with all her relationships, thus her daughter also was set apart from her.

So I play with genealogy. It is a substitute for having a family of origin which was severely damaged by intolerance. Some of that was due to alcoholism and religiosity, and lots of strong women wanting to run each other's lives. I hope I didn't pass it along to my sons, and am very proud of how they are raising their own children.